In a Feb. 14 CNSNews.com article, Dan Joseph writes that "the director of the Congressional Budget Office was testifying in the House Budget Committee that the health-care law President Barack Obama signed last year will kill about 800,000 American jobs over the next decade."

But that's not what Douglas Elmendorf said. As Media Matters explained, the one-half percent labor force reduction Elmendorf talked about comes from "reducing the amount of labor that workers choose to supply" as a result of increased health care benefits motivating people to "work fewer hours," not from top-down job eliminations.

Joseph does try to explain that later in his article, but his lead claiming that health care reform will "kill about 800,000 American jobs" is an inaccurate portrayal of reality.

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) focuses on the new kids on the block, the conservatives elected with tea party backing to overturn the liberal spending agenda in Washington. Nobody could have fit that description better than Donald Trump, who was a surprise speaker at CPAC and is planning to run for president.

Perhaps because Republicans won the House and are not gearing up for an imminent election, the 11,000 attendees seemed a bit less exuberant this year than last. But Trump electrified the crowd with a combination of shots across the Democratic bow and his trademark candid comments and boasts.

[...]

CPAC’s exhibit hall had the usual carnival–like atmosphere. Signs at booths said “Kill the Death Tax,” and “Defend Your Healthcare.” Everyone seemed to be interviewing everyone else.

But the star of the show clearly was Trump, who is gearing up to announce his candidacy in June. “If I run and if I win, this country will be respected again,” Trump promised to wild cheers.

He is not, nor has he ever been a conservative. How quickly CPAC organizers forget Trump’s support of and praise for both Bill and Hillary Clinton in all their campaigns — as well as the scores of other liberal Democrats he has financed in states where he has business interests.

This is someone to be listened to? Especially as he trashes the one candidate, Ron Paul, who has maintained steady and consistent principles for over 30 years?

Last Sunday we celebrated the 100th birthday of America’s greatest conservative leader, Ronald Reagan. But by Thursday we were listening to Donald Trump comment on public issues?

The president is supposed to listen to the people and pay attention to their desires and demands for what they expect for their country.

Unfortunately, this president has his own agenda and intends to get what he wants. Listen to his speeches as he talks about health care, gays in the military, illegal immigration, government growth, deficits and more. It's what he wants, and everyone else be damned.

The message of the midterm election was that the people want lower taxes, smaller government, less spending and less debt.

Everybody heard, except Obama. His speech was filled with how the government will solve all the problems.

That he already tried it to the tune of billions doesn't faze him. It's what he wants and by God, he intends to do it.

He managed to slip and slide through issues of his choosing, ignoring those that most Americans consider critical.

The real question is whether Americans will hold Obama's feet to the fire, forcing him to act like an elected American president and not like our own version of a dictator.

In the summer of 2009, when the world witnessed brave Iranians taking to the streets in an effort to overthrow the Islamofascist regime that was terrorizing them, the president of the United States merely shrugged his shoulders and shuffled his feet. Encouraging words somehow failed him. But today, as the world watches the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 occur right before its eyes, Obama suddenly sees it fit to stretch out a hand of solidarity to the Muslim Brotherhood – giving the Islamist group a green light to share power in a post-Mubarak Egyptian government. In other words, instead of taking a concrete stand against a jihadist entity, a U.S. president has given it his own personal blessing and stamp of approval. It's the Jimmy Carter-1979 shah betrayal all over again – and with horrific deadly consequences once again on the horizon.

None of this, of course, should come as any surprise; rather, it should be completely expected. Barack Obama is, after all, a man of the left, and the left is always charmed by adversarial terrorist forces that seek to do harm to free democratic societies. Thus, helping to pave the road for the Muslim Brotherhood to take power in Egypt is only to be expected from America's radical in chief.

Two years ago, for the first time since Nixon, I did not attend the Presidential Inauguration. I went instead to the Holy Land to pray for a country that would elect a man without leadership or executive credentials, a tragically unqualified rhetorical celebrity – and give him control of Congress. I also prayed for our new president, who needs all our prayers. Thankfully, the people, and the tea party, realizing their error, recently elected a new Congress in which the House began, for the first time, with a reading of the Constitution, a document second only to the Bible in historical import (amazingly, some on the left criticized the reading!); and required that future congressional actions have constitutional authority. Imagine that!

In the summer of 2009, when the world witnessed brave Iranians taking to the streets in an effort to overthrow the Islamofascist regime that was terrorizing them, the president of the United States merely shrugged his shoulders and shuffled his feet. Encouraging words somehow failed him. But today, as the world watches the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 occur right before its eyes, Obama suddenly sees it fit to stretch out a hand of solidarity to the Muslim Brotherhood – giving the Islamist group a green light to share power in a post-Mubarak Egyptian government. In other words, instead of taking a concrete stand against a jihadist entity, a U.S. president has given it his own personal blessing and stamp of approval. It's the Jimmy Carter-1979 shah betrayal all over again – and with horrific deadly consequences once again on the horizon.

None of this, of course, should come as any surprise; rather, it should be completely expected. Barack Obama is, after all, a man of the left, and the left is always charmed by adversarial terrorist forces that seek to do harm to free democratic societies.

Obama made an excuse that "They just don't know me." BS! People who dislike Obama don't have to know him on a personal level. As president he should put his best foot forward, but he hasn't. I don't need to know the president personally to know his policies are ridiculous, or that he's arrogant and one-sided. Obama is looking out for Obama. He seems to think he can do no wrong and that he's turned this country around for the better. He needs to take the rose-colored glasses off and humble himself before he falls into an even deeper hole.

Obama, give us education? What is he, the King? Is he God? Uh, I guess it means give more taxpayer money for the public education system, which is a complete failure no matter how much money you throw at it! It cost my Dad $1 to teach me how to read, and he did it in one day. He bought a pencil, a piece of paper and a "Dick and Jane" book. He wrote down cat, dog, rat, hog. He made me sound them out. Presto! I could read!

Last Thursday, President Hosni Mubarak stuck it to the "mullah in chief " when the Egyptian strongman told Obama to stick it – that is, stay out of the country's affairs – and declared that, despite Obama's outrageous demand that he leave and allow the Muslim Brotherhood into any new government, he would remain Egypt's leader through September 2011. While no Vaudeville act, this was the ultimate banana cream pie in Obama's face. By the next morning, Mubarak had backed down and resigned in the face of obvious threats by the Obama administration to cut off economic aid to Egypt. Nevertheless, Mubarak had made his point on his way out by having given his middle finger to our "fearless leader."

In his Feb. 2 WorldNetDaily video, titled "America's blood-stained hands," which was one long anti-abortion rant insisting, among other things, that MTV's "No Easy Decision" was a "30-minute pro-abortion commercial" (actually, it dared to be even-handed on the subject, a concept ol' Molotov is extremely unacquainted with). Mitchell concluded his video by saying that "all the money in the world can't buy that blood off your hands," adding: "May God have mercy on our nation. But if he doesn't -- if he chooses to destroy our economy, if he chooses to take away our life and our freedom, if he chooses to punish us -- well, we certainly deserve it."

Speaking of blood-stained hands, let's look at Mr. Mitchell. You'll recall that, as a part of his gay-bashing efforts to achieve "the abolition of homosexuality," Mitchell endorsed a proposed law in Uganda that would make mere homosexuality punishable by death, while denying that it did any such thing.

What have been the fruits of Mitchell's enthusiastic endorsement of killing gays? In October, a Ugandan newspaper published the names and pictures of "Uganda's Top Homos" with the additional headline, "Hang Them." Sure enough, inJanuary, one of the people the newspaper identified, David Kato, was murdered. As we've noted, while Ugandan police have claimed that Kato was killed by, in the words of anti-gay activist Scott Lively, a "live-in male prostitute who murdered Kato for failing to pay him as promised," no proof to back up the claim has been forwarded, and some have noted that police may try to cover up a motive of homophobia in Kato's death to protect the Western aid upon which the country relies. And the publisher of the paper that put the "Hang Them" headline next to a picture of Kato says, "I have no regrets about the story. We were just exposing people who were doing wrong."

That sounds a lot like Mitchell's attitude, doesn't it? We suspect that if Mitchell thought he could get away with telling people to hang gays, he would do it. "Abolition of homosexuality," remember?

Before Mitchell starts moralizing about the blood on other people's hands, he might want to do something about the blood on his own. May God have mercy on him.

P.S. The same goes for Mitchell's fellow gay-hater, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media.

It wouldn't be Joseph Farah if he wasn't acting thin-skinned about his media competition, and he has devoted a couple recent columns to this thin-skinned attitude.

In his Feb. 4 WorldNetDaily column, Farah complains that "two big newspapers – one in the U.S. and one in the U.K. – chose to rewrite WND news stories, using content exclusively from WND, without ever once citing their source for the information." Farah names them both -- the New York Daily News and the UK's Daily Mail, dismissing them as "trashy tabloids" that "have their place" as "tomorrow's birdcage liners" which "have no professional standards" and "do very little real reporting"and are "mouthpieces for fat-cat corporate owners who have agendas."

But Farah went further in attacking one of those papers:

One of the reports, in the Daily News, even had a byline attached to its story, suggesting a reporter had demonstrated some enterprise in gathering the facts. Well, to me, it was like a thief who left behind a calling card.

So, I dashed off a note to Daily News staff writer Michael Sheridan with a little challenge: "I'm getting pretty sick of your uncredited rewrites of WND content. Do I need to complain to your editor and go public with this example of shameless unprofessionalism? Or do you want to just knock it off because it's the right thing to do?"

I never heard from Sheridan – so here we are.

Farah didn't mention that he made any similar attempt at reparations from the Daily Mail. Perhaps that's because WND uses the Daily Mail as a source. Over the past three months, WND haspublishedfourarticles citing the Daily Mail as a source.

That runs counter to Farah's claim that the Daily Mail doesn't have "anything worth stealing." Which, of course, is exactly what WND is doing, credited or not.

Farah also claimed:

Have you ever noticed the way WND credits other media all the time?

If we get information from another news source, we typically cite that source – whether it's a major newspaper or wire service or a one-man blog.

In his Feb. 11 column, Farah was aghast that "AOL has agreed to purchase the Huffington Puffington Post for some $300 million and to place left-wing activist and non-journalist in charge of the entire AOL news operation," going on to call Ariana Huffington "a good shakedown artist."Farah goes on to lament that "it's amazingly sad what money can do to buy credibility where none actually exists.

It seems like Farah is having a fit of professional jealousy. Farah has been running WND a lot longer than Huffington's website has been around, and the value of his website is a lot closer to the $1 the Washington Times sold for than the $315 million AOL bought HuffPo for.

Farah complains that Huffington "made a name for herself with the Huffington Puffington Post by opening up her website to a parade of celebrity know-nothings to hurl the most irresponsible and groundless accusations against public figures with whom she disagrees." This conveniently ignores the fact that WND's main function upon its 1997 founding was to attack President Clinton, and functions today as a font of anti-Obama attacks.

Farah concludes with a personal attack on Huffington and her alleged devotion to an Indian guru. Given that the top two officials at WND have ties to accused cult leader Roy Masters, Farah has little room to complain about such things.

Waters' Slobbering Review of Anti-NY Times BookTopic: Media Research Center

In a Feb. 11 MRC TimesWatch post, Clay Waters serves up a laughably fawning review of William McGowan's anti-New York Times book, "Gray Lady Down." Waters hyperbolically calls it "a carefully researched and devastatingly convincing critique of the Times losing its commitment to objective reporting."

Waters' employer, of course, operates a "news" division that doesn'tknowthemeaning of objective reporting.

Throughout his slobbering review, Waters fails to identify McGowan as a conservative or a book as a conservative-oriented attack. Waters also injects his own right-wing bias into the review, at one point denouncing Obama's speech on racial issues as "unmemorable." According to who? Does anyone who isn't predisposed to denigrating every word that comes out of Obama's mouth think that?

Then again, perhaps he doesn't have to identify McGowan as a conservative, since he tacitly admits it in a sad bit of self-promotion:

In a brief foray into partisan politics, McGowan cites a fine media watchdog site called Times Watch, which analyzed a month of stories the Times did on Barack Obama and Republican John McCain during a slice of the 2008 campaign and found that positive portrayals for Obama outnumbering negative ones by a 3:1 ratio. When it came to McCain, that positive/negative ratio was reversed.

Still, Waters does attempt to keep up the pretense of McGowan being a nonpartisan writer, asserting that McGowan just wants "a much better version of the Times than is being produced by the current regime," a conclusion with which "all but the most politically in denial Americans would surely agree."

Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Familiar Lincoln idolaters will gather to celebrate the birth, on Feb. 12, 1809, of the 16th president of the United States and finesse his role in "the butchering business" – to use professor J. R. Pole's turn-of-phrase. Court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is sure to make a media appearance to extol the virtues of the president who shed the blood of brothers in great quantities and urged into existence the "American System" of taxpayer-sponsored grants of government privilege to politically connected corporations.

[...]

The "pseudo-intellectuals who [are] devoted to pulling the wool over the public's eyes" have a lot to answer for. Lincoln's violent, unconstitutional revolution took the lives of 620,000 individuals (including 50,000 Southern civilians, blacks included), maimed thousands and brought about "the near destruction of 40 percent of the nation's economy." "The costs of an action cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to morality," wrote the Mises Institute's David Gordon in "Secession, State & Liberty." Almost every other country at the time chose the path of peaceful emancipation. Yet today's Americans look upon the terrible forces Lincoln unleashed as glorious events, the native appetite having habituated to carnage over time.

[...]

The more plausible explanation is that, in 1861, Lincoln kidnapped and killed the Constitution. The Jacobins who lionize Lincoln's actions (by referring to his billowing prose) have been covering up his crimes and ignoring the consequences of his coup ever since.

Clay Waters asserts in a Feb. 9 MRC TimesWatch item that the New York Times is on an "Amnesty-for-Illegals Hobby Horse," claiming that the DREAM Act "would have granted amnesty to hundreds of thousands of student illegals."

Wrong. As we've detailed, "amnesty" is defined as "a general pardon for offenses, esp. political offenses, against a government, often granted before any trial or conviction." The implication is that there are no preconditions before the amnesty is given. Since the DREAM Act would require that "student illegals" enroll in college or serve in the military as a prerequisite for applying for legal permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship -- as well as meet certain residency requirements in order to qualify for benefits under the act -- it is by definition not amnesty.

Pretending that every proposal to put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship is "amnesty," as the MRC is wont to do, is simply factually inaccurate.

Same As The Old Boss: Kessler Sucks Up to New CPAC Chief TooTopic: Newsmax

As a longtime buddy of the American Conservative Union's David Keene and recipient of the ACU's "Robert Novak Journalist of the Year Award," it was inevitable that Newsmax's Ronald Kessler would help Keene deflect controversies surrounding CPAC, which the ACU operates, regarding its allowing the gay conservative group GOProud to participate (and completely ignoring claims that Keene's ex-wife embezzled money from the group).

Thus, it's even more inevitable that Kessler would similarly suck up to Keene's replacement as ACU leader, Al Cardenas -- and that's exactly what he does in a Feb. 10 Newsmax column, touting how Cardenas is "a mentor of Sen. Marco Rubio" and once told off Fidel Castro.

Kessler also gives Keene a valedictory toast, declaring that he is "one of the country’s most astute political observers" who is "proud that he leaves the 1 million-member ACU on a sound footing." He also baselessly declares the ACU's ratings for members of Congress "the gold standard for assessing the ideology of members of Congress."

Kessler also serves up another dismissal of CPAC controversies:

Some critics claimed that Cardenas was not socially conservative enough. Others attacked Keene for allowing GOProud, a gay conservative organization, to have a booth at CPAC. Still others criticized CPAC for not putting enough emphasis on national security issues in its selection of speakers.

Given that the conservative movement encompasses those who believe in strong national security, fiscal restraint, and socially conservative values, tensions will inevitably arise among those who wish to advance only one of those causes and don’t recognize the value of combining forces to win elections.

“Unfortunately, we have conservatives who think that the movement ought to be defined in terms of themselves,” Keene says. “But that’s not the way you build a very popular movement. It’s not the way you attract very many people. And it’s certainly not the way you win an election.”

Wrong -- not even Klein's article does that. Rather, it obsesses over semantics:

In partnership with a government fund initiated by Barack Obama, philanthropist and billionaire activist George Soros is investing in a private equity company that just launched in the Palestinian territories.

The company, Siraj Fund Management Company, says it was created "for the sole purpose of managing investment funds in Palestine."

The new company's website repeatedly refers to what it calls the "country" of "Palestine." There is, however, no such country as Palestine. Siraj is apparently referring to territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

There is no "creation" of Palestine by Obama and Soros -- a fund management company that has received investment money from Soros and from an initiative "to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries" announced by Obama in 2009 (under the auspices of a government-operated development finance institution, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, that was founded in 1971) has chosen to use the word "Palestine" to describe the area where it will be managing funds, perhaps because Klein's suggested construct of "territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority" doesn't exactly roll of the tongue.

If we can't blame the headline's lie on Klein, we can still blame him for some fundamental dishonesty. He repeats his misleading claim that a reported issued by a Soros-funded group "urges the Egyptian regime to allow the [Muslim Brotherhood] to participate in political life" without also noting that the report also called for the Brotherhood to moderate its views.

The U.S. military is being ordered to start accepting and recruiting active and open homosexuals into all services at the very same time it is prosecuting and imprisoning heterosexual adulterers.

This strikes me as somewhat schizophrenic.

If you doubt me, let me submit the case of William C. Gurney, the former top enlisted man for the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

On Jan. 28, the master sergeant was sentenced at a court-martial to 20 months in military prison and given a dishonorable discharge for sex-related charges with 10 female airmen.

Reports from the courtroom said he appeared stunned.

I'm not surprised. I'm stunned, too.

The question on the minds of many Americans upon hearing this news will be: "Is homosexual sex in the military OK, while heterosexual carousing is not?"

The charges he was convicted of include indecent conduct, dereliction of duty, adultery, failure to maintain professional relationships and misuse of government communications equipment including a computer, cell phone and e-mail account he used to send and receive sexually charged text messages and photos.

A law professor said the punishment was designed to send a message about how the Air Force is going to treat "sexual harassment." However, Gurney wasn't convicted of sexual harassment. He was convicted instead of adultery, among other charges.

Now, understand I don't have a problem with Gurney's conviction or his sentence.

I just question how the military can justify punishing and expelling adulterers while embracing open homosexuality.

To believe what Farah believes, one must gloss over, as he does, exactly what Gurney was accused of doing.

From a separate Dayton Daily News article from the one Farah linked to:

On Thursday, the jury deliberated more than six hours at Scott Air Force Base before finding Gurney guilty of mistreating two female airman by making repeated sexually offensive comments to them and pursuing sexual relationships with them.

The jury acquitted Gurney on three remaining charges, unwanted touching of an airman’s breasts and buttocks; and trying to influence Air Force personnel to assign two women he liked to where he would have access to them.

[...]

Gurney used his authority to find and zero in on the airmen he liked, Maj. Patricia Gruen, the government’s chief prosecutor, told the jury. He made one of the photos that highlighted his genitals and was electronically transmit to an airman in his AFMC office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Gruen said in her closing argument.

“He used this organization like his own personal Match.com,” Gruen told the jurors, known as court members in military parlance. “This is how Chief Gurney chose to use his prestigious position as a command chief.”

Arguably, adultery was the least of the offenses Gurney was guilty of. But Farah also appears to be ignorant of the military definition of adultery. From Slate:

Proving adultery under military guidelines is no mean prosecutorial feat. According to Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the prosecution must prove that the accused not only committed the indiscretion, but also that his or her conduct "was to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces or was of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces." In other words, the affair must somehow have hampered the military's ability to do its job—say, by lowering morale on a base, or by damaging the public's faith in the armed forces.

In April 2002, President Bush further discouraged adultery prosecutions by issuing an executive order that clarified the circumstances that might necessitate legal action. Although the order maintained that "adultery is clearly unacceptable conduct," it also listed a variety of factors that commanders should take into consideration before proceeding with a court martial. These include the accused's rank, the impact of the affair on the involved parties' job performance, and whether any of the hanky-panky took place while the accused was on the clock.

In other words, Gurney had to engage in much more than mere sexual intercourse with a woman who wasn't his wife to be convicted of adultery.

It's absurd for Farah to conflate adultery as defined by the military with mere gay sex. But he does anyway:

Adulterers have no political lobby. There are no pro-adultery organizations with any political clout. Adulterers don't get together and raise money for politicians to promote their lifestyle. Homosexuals, on the other hand, are extremely politically active.

Then again, Farah thinks adulterers should die. Imagine what he thinks should happen to gays.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said today that he told his daughter to buy a Japanese car--a Toyota Sienna--and that she did so.

LaHood's comment came as he announced the results of a 10-month long Department of Transportation study that was undertaken to determine whether electronic systems could have been responsible for reports of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles. The study determined that this was not the case.

LaHood's statement that he told his daughter to buy a Japanese car also came less than two months after he announced a "Buy America" campaign at the Department of Transportation (DOT).

NEW ARTICLE: Aaron Klein, Mubarak MouthpieceTopic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem reporter does the bidding of the Egyptian dictator while relying on distortions and anonymous sources to dismiss the will of the Egyptian people -- even apparently making sure the regime got copies of his Obama smear book. Read more >>

A Feb. 10 NewsBusters post by Ken Shepherd begins: "Today marks the opening of the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Regardless of where you may stand on internal debates about some of this year's co-sponsors, there's no denying that for nearly four decades its been an enduring legacy of conservative political activism."

Shepherd curiously didn't mention that his employer and the operator of NewsBusters, the Media Research Center, has taken a clear stand on those "internal debates" -- and it's the opposite of the stand Shepherd is taking.

As we've noted, the MRC is boycotting CPAC this year over its inclusion of the gay conservative group GOProud -- a fact it has yet to report in any straightforward fashion to its readers. It hasn't even bothered to issue a press release to announce its decision.

The closest we've seen is a Feb. 9 NewsBusters post by Matthew Balan stating that CNN contributor Jon Avlon "erroneously included Capital Research Center" on a list of groups boycotting CPAC, parenthetically adding, "perhaps he meant the Media Research Center, the parent company of NewsBusters."

It seems that the MRC's dealings with CPAC -- taking a bold stand by boycotting, but not terribly eager to publicize that stand -- are nearly as cowardly and contradictory as that of WorldNetDaily.

WorldNetDaily tried to put its own bizarre spin on the unrest in Egypt with a Feb. 5 article suggesting that the "pale rider" depicted in the Book of Revelation was captured in a video image of the protests. Of course, Revelation's "pale rider" was a harbinger of plague, which we have not seen in Egypt.